Much has been made of Oxford University's refusal to grant Baroness Thatcher
an honorary degree – but her legacy to higher education endures, says Daniel
Weinbren.

Much has been written about the refusal, in 1985, of Oxford University to award Margaret Thatcher an honorary degree, even though all the other post-war PMs who had studied there had been accorded this honour.

Anger over higher education funding cuts lay behind this decision. However, as Education Secretary in the early 1970s Margaret Thatcher had already made two decisions which demonstrated her interest in challenging conventional higher education sector funding.

The first one was to ignore the patrician voices in her own party which derided the newly-opened Open University. She opted to retain Labour’s project.

However, there was a twist. She wanted the Open University to compete by accepting 18 year-old students, not simply ‘mature’ ones. There was a row, but, unlike almost all UK universities, the OU was not under the umbrella of the University Grants Committee. It was a model for how central government influence could be brought to bear.

She then became associated with another institution which accepted students who had not passed any A-levels. In 1976 she unveiled the foundation stone of the independent University of Buckingham.

Of course, her support for innovative structures occurred against the backdrop of the broader removal of much higher education funding. In 1976 confidence in sterling was so low that the government sought help from the International Monetary Fund. In return for the largest loan ever made by that institution, public expenditure was cut.

This policy was maintained after Thatcher became PM in 1979. In 1981 the UK’s universities were given a month to make an 18 per cent cut in their budgets, and 3,000 academic posts were eliminated. In 1984 student grants were frozen.

But the moves which followed, to increase commercial and corporate opportunities and to create market-like conditions within the state-funded sector, had longer and wider roots.

In 1986 selective funding of research, based on a state-supervised peer review process, strengthened the stratification of universities and competition between them. 1988 saw the abolition of tenure and academic freedom being framed in a more constrained manner.

In addition the University Grants Committee, the buffer between the government and universities, was replaced with a number of bodies which were less like barriers and more like the arms of government.

The greater central control was linked to the devolution of some responsibilities to universities and support for vocationally relevant higher education, closer links to employers and a wider range of modes of provision.

If you seek a memorial for Thatcherism, look not to Oxford, which was stillarguing over naming a building after her in 2012, but to the transformation of the Higher Education sector, now increasingly structured along market lines within an international landscape.